Twelve Days of Box Office: Day Six
Dreamgirls succeeds where Showgirls did not
By David Mumpower
December 26, 2006
Finishing just outside the top five is the other new entrant from Christmas Day. Glen Morgan, half of the Morgan/Wong X-Files team who found later fame with the Final Destination franchise, has re-made Black Christmas, the 1974 classic from director Bob Clark. You might know him from another work that was on TBS all day yesterday, A Christmas Story. Face it, the man had some turbulent holidays growing up. Anyway, Morgan took a shot at creating another modern update of a slasher classic, but the results are largely mixed. Black Christmas earned only $3.3 million in its debut.
There is also a significant chance that this one will not see the same strong holdover that all the other projects in the top ten are experiencing. If that is the case, the low-budget nature of the genre probably still makes this a wash as a worst case scenario and potentially even profitable for MGM. But in three months when you ask someone what the other release was the day that Dreamgirls came out, there is almost no chance they will come up with the right answer. Black Christmas is mainly good for trivia purposes, much like 1999's The Love Letter (look up the release date on it to figure out why).
Today's top ten table has been done a bit differently from prior days in the Twelve Days of Box Office. When you look at the table below, pay particular attention to how movies improved from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. In the future, whenever someone on the site discusses how much a holiday may negatively impact a movie's forward progress financially, keep this case study in mind. Eragon's 72% growth is the smallest in the top ten.
|
Box Office for 12/25/06
|
Rank |
Film |
Number
of Sites |
Change from 12/24 |
Estimated
Gross ($) |
Cumulative
Gross ($) |
|
1
|
Night at the Museum
|
3,685
|
+98%
|
11.9
|
42.8
|
|
2
|
Dreamgirls
|
852
|
N/A
|
8.4
|
8.4
|
|
3
|
The Pursuit of Happyness
|
2,863
|
+137%
|
7.6
|
60.9
|
|
4
|
Rocky Balboa
|
2,752
|
+148%
|
5.0
|
26.8
|
|
5
|
The Good Shepherd
|
2,218
|
+89%
|
4.1
|
14.0
|
|
6
|
Black Christmas
|
1,278
|
N/A
|
3.3
|
3.3
|
|
7
|
We Are Marshall
|
2,606
|
+168%
|
2.4
|
8.5
|
|
8
|
Eragon
|
3,030
|
+72%
|
2.3
|
39.9
|
|
9
|
The Holiday
|
2,617
|
+113%
|
2.0
|
37.0
|
|
10
|
Charlotte's Web
|
3,728
|
+167%
|
2.0
|
28.5
|
Continued:
1
2
|
|
|
|
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